Love Battle Princess

If it’s not obvious from the title, Love Battle Princess is an odd game. At its heart, it’s a fresh take on the action puzzle genre. However, the in-game backgrounds are beautifully painted images of scantily-clad pin-up girls in suggestive poses. Bizarrely, these ladies, with names like Nitro and Panther, are the princesses of the title.

Four princesses are included, and each one comes with her own set of challenges, or levels. To unlock each princess, you must complete all of the challenges for the one before her. However, if trying to see the next sexy background doesn’t give you a raging desire to keep playing, the gameplay probably will.

This won’t hurt a bit.

Here’s how the game works: little flowers float around, and your job is to capture them in bubbles by tapping the screen. Make three bubbles, and they all pop, giving you points and creating new flowers. The more flowers you trap, the more points you get. Pretty simple. But if you nab a hundred points in a single pop, and a vortex is created that sucks nearby flowers into its center. Vortexes are your gateway to huge point-racking combos, because you can grab all the flowers in a vortex in a single bubble.

Watch out, though. Enemy skulls also wander around the screen, and grabbing them in a bubble causes you damage. So does letting a flower touch the bottom of the screen. To balance things out, each princess has a unique special ability that can be used once you gain enough points. One ability lets you destroy skulls by touching them, and one sends in a flurry of flowers. Using a special ability also flashes to a brief cutscene that grants you a close-up of your princess’s softer parts.

It may sound somewhat complicated, but the challenges for the first princess act as a tutorial, giving you a firm grasp on how everything works.

Yeah, they’re all basically in stripper uniforms.

Even though the gameplay feels quite varied at first, the challenges repeat for each girl, making the game feel a little stagnant. For instance, one of the challenges for the first princess requires you to earn 2,000 points with one life, while one for the third princess requires 20,000 points. Also, the game becomes extremely difficult toward the end, so unlocking Panther, the fourth and final princess, takes much dedication. If sexy ladies are your thing, though, Panther’s background is worth the effort.

Also included are a handful of power-ups, a survival mode, OpenFeint integration, and unlockable wallpapers. All of which adds up to a surprisingly deep action puzzle game that fans of the genre (and fans of sexy pin-up girls) will appreciate. We couldn’t stop playing the game, whether because of the addictive nature of the gameplay or the drive to unlock all of the princesses, we’re not sure. If you’re not convinced, download the light version and try it for yourself. Just don’t play it in public.

Love Battle Princess is a simple game of flowers and combos. You just tap the screen to create bubbles around the blue or yellow flowers that float around, avoiding skulls while building up your combos. But we think most heterosexual male gamers will be more interested in hearing about the sexy pin-ups adorning the background than the basic puzzle gameplay.

Love Battle Princess is one of those games like Sexy Poker that you would probably be too embarrassed to play on the bus sitting next to a little old lady who reminds you of your grandmother. As you play through the game’s challenge mode, you’ll unlock Pulse, Bounty, and Nitro, who each have a special attack to go along with their stunning good looks. There’s also one more model that requires you to achieve gold medals on all challenges, so most casual gamers probably won’t be able to unlock her without some practice.

In its current state, Love Battle Princess is not too sexually explicit, except for a few leering close-ups when you activate your model’s special move. Still, we would not be surprised if Apple found the game to be too objectionable for the App Store.

The puzzle game itself starts off simple, but eventually becomes quite challenging. We are told that more challenges will be added to smooth out the difficulty curve, and some more explanation is required for certain game mechanics, like whirling vortexes that attract nearby flowers.

Other interesting game mechanics, like boss skulls that you have to destroy, power-ups to pick up, and the way you have to prevent any floating flowers from reaching the bottom of the screen mean there’s a lot more going on than just the sexy background models. Even though we can’t see this game being appropriate for just anyone, it’s shaping up to be a surprisingly deep puzzle game with an attractive aesthetic.

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